What Is Art? A methodological framework for a pluridisciplinary investigation

Pignocchi, Alessandro

doi:10.3726/81609_122

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 30 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…And there is now a rich, and burgeoning literature from researchers interested in how expression and interpretation in the artistic sense might be dealt with in cognitive terms (Macmahon 2001;Bateman 2009;Pignocchi 2009;Wildgen 2009;Furlong 2014;Jucker and Barrett 2011;Oliviera 2013;Kolaiti 2015;Mitchell 2015 Guzzling under the current, against it, all muscle and slur In the finland of perch, the fenland of alder, on air…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

That bloody so-and-so has retired: Expressives revisited

Wharton

2016

Lingua

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract:In this paper, I revisit my own work (2003a, 2003b, 2009) on interjections and nonverbal behaviours and build on Blakemore's (2011) account of the descriptive ineffability of expressive meaning. Whilst I agree with Blakemore's claim that expressives are best explained through an analysis that uses, on the one hand, procedural meaning, and, on the other, the idea that they show one's emotions, rather than mean NN anything in the Gricean sense, I ask two questions by way of developing the account further. Firstly, what is the relationship between the procedural meaning in Blakemore's account of expressives and the kind encoded by discourse connectives? Secondly, to what extent do we want to say that expressives mean anything at all? In answering these questions I aim to shed light on what expressive meaning is, and how it works.

show abstract

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

That bloody so-and-so has retired: Expressives revisited

Wharton

2016

Lingua

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…and "Why fiction?". Although debates surrounding the nature of fiction and the arts (Pignocchi, 2009;Searle, 1975;Walton, 1993) as well as the emerging consensus on the role of communicative intents and pragmatics in fiction (McCallum et al, 2020;Pignocchi, 2012;Schaeffer, 1999;Heintz & Scott-Phillips, 2023), are important issues, they are not central to our framework. Despite our focus on fiction, we believe that our paper could be relevant beyond fiction studies, to understand the appeal of other cultural productions and phenomena, such as short clips, news, and non-fictional narratives more broadly.…”

Section: Introduction: Fiction As a Puzzle About Human Psychologymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Cognitive Foundations of Fictional Stories

Dubourg,

Thouzeau,

Beuchot

et al. 2024

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We hypothesize that fictional stories are highly successful in human cultures partly because they activate evolved cognitive mechanisms, for instance for finding mates (e.g., in romance fiction), exploring the world (e.g., in adventure and speculative fiction), or avoiding predators (e.g., in horror fiction). In this paper, we put forward a comprehensive framework to study fiction through this evolutionary lens. The primary goal of this framework is to carve fictional stories at their cognitive joints using an evolutionary framework. Reviewing a wide range of adaptive variations in human psychology – in personality and developmental psychology, behavioral ecology, and evolutionary biology, among other disciplines –, this framework also addresses the question of interindividual differences in preferences for different features in fictional stories. It generates a wide range of predictions about the patterns of combinations of such features, according to the pattenrs of variations in the mechanisms triggered by fictional stories. As a result of a highly collaborative effort, we present a comprehensive review of evolved cognitive mechanisms that fictional stories activate. To generate this review, we (1) listed more than 70 adaptive challenges humans faced in the course of their evolution, (2) identified the adaptive psychological mechanisms that evolved in response to such challenges, (3) specified four sources of adaptive variability for the sensitivity of each mechanism (i.e., personality traits, sex, age, and ecological conditions), and (4) linked these mechanisms to the story features that trigger them. This comprehensive framework lays the ground for a theory-driven research program for the study of fictional stories, their content, distribution, structure, and cultural evolution.

show abstract

What Is Art? A methodological framework for a pluridisciplinary investigation

Cited by 2 publications

References 30 publications

That bloody so-and-so has retired: Expressives revisited

That bloody so-and-so has retired: Expressives revisited

The Cognitive Foundations of Fictional Stories

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About